Daily Archives: November 22, 2011

Show me the study: A tale of two Tory tactics when it comes to facts on crime

OTTAWA — Little more than an hour after one Conservative was attacked for failing to cough up studies to support the government’s tough-on-crime agenda, another was lacing into a community group for the same reason.

Quebec Justice Minister Jean-Marc Fournier emerged from a meeting with his federal counterpart Rob Nicholson frustrated after he was told the government would not put a hold on Bill C-10 — the controversial Safe Streets and Communities Act that gets tough on young offenders, child molesters, drug producers, Canadians in foreign jails and those seeking pardons.

Quebec wants the government to consider a series of amendments that take into account the province’s focus on rehabilitation and reintegration of young offenders, and Fournier asked to see the studies that support the Tory approach to criminal justice over Quebec’s.

He was instead told the provisions in C-10 were based on “personal observations.”

Nicholson later cited a study used in the drafting of the bill that “zeroed in on a small group of out of control young people,” but he dismissed a 2005 study by his own department that suggested strict minimum mandatory sentences don’t work and jurisdictions that once adopted them have since become more flexible.

Meanwhile, a Commons committee on public safety was debating another crime-related bill — C-19 which seeks to scrap the long-gun registry.

I happened to tune in just as Conservative MP Wai Young zeroed in on witnesses Ann Decter and Lyda Fuller of the YWCA for failing to conduct their own “empirical study” or produce others studies linking the registry to a reduction in gun crime, including gun crime related to domestic violence.

She asked about the studies following a lengthy diatribe in which she referenced her own experience as a sociologist working in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and recapped previous testimony that contradicted that of the YWCA women.

Decter said she’d be “more than happy” to conduct such a study if the government agreed to pay for it and went on to offer so-called “personal observation” recounted to her and others by then Senior Deputy RCMP Commissioner Marty Cheliak the last time she appeared before committee on the registry in May 2010:

A family phoned the police because they felt the father wad depressed and they were concerned about the guns that they had in the house, she recounted.

They told the police the guns that they thought were in the house. The police did a check on the registry and found there were 21 additional guns registered in the house that the rest of the family knew nothing about.

This is the kind of evidence that you can have in terms of prevention.

So the question remains, do studies trump personal observations or do personal observations trump studies?

I guess it depends on which piece of crime legislation the government is talking about.

Interestingly enough, many of those who support the omnibus crime bill, oppose the government’s plan to scrap the long-gun registry.

The devaluation those with disabilities

In my hotel room in London, I turn on the evening news. Another story about the financial crisis that overshadows Europe. A news anchor furrows his brow and asks another hard-hitting question regarding disability benefits, the Britons who abuse them, and the austerity measures.

An expert talks about abuse within the system, about how the government needs to ensure that benefits are paid out as necessary but that those who habitually abuse the system need to be strongly encouraged to become “productive.”

They speak with gravity, as if the whole financial crisis has been caused by those who fake disability, by those who “use” their disability to reach into taxpayers’ pockets and, of course, those with legitimate disabilities who have never contributed and who never will.

Everyone nods.

Focus is taken from the rich and powerful who grew rich and powerful through mismanagement and corruption. It’s easier to be angry at those “below” you than at those “above.”

This is true “trickle-down” economics. Hate trickles down. Prejudice trickles down. But worst of all, violence trickles down. And I feel it. I hear it. Especially, when it trickles on me.

I was pushing down a hallway, wheels fighting against thick carpet. A fellow in a suit came by, asked me, kindly, if I’d like some help, if could he push me. I said, “No, carpet is tough to push on, but it gives me a good workout.” He smiled back and said, “Well, it’s nice to meet one of you people that’s not simply lazy.”

I stopped and stared at him and he smiled back, thinking that he’d complimented me. That his remark had risen me up from the “lazy scum” who don’t work. I took offense at his compliment. He walked off, not having been challenged in his belief, but simply determining that I was the exception that proved the rule. It was my first hint that I’d somehow become one of “those people” … those people they talk about on television.

I am shopping in Tesco, looking for some candies to take back to the kids. Ruby, who’s five, love’s the idea that she’s eating candy that is from far away. Sadie, who’s two, doesn’t care where it’s from, if it’s sweet she likes it. So, I had just picked up some “sticky toffee pudding cookies” and put them in the bag at the back of my wheelchair, when I noticed that a young couple was watching me. With disgust on their faces.

At first I thought it was because people don’t like seeing fat people buy cookies, but then, I got the feeling that they had classified me as a “useless” cripple using benefit money to buy something frivolous. I suddenly wanted to explain about the kids, about the fact that I’m a working man, about the fact that I “contribute.” But, didn’t. It would have played into the idea, once again, that I’m somehow a special kind of cripple.

Bar conversations are iffy at best. But, I’d fallen into conversation with a couple and we were talking about a variety of issues. I illustrated a point I was making by referring to a television commercial that’s playing here in England about child abuse. In it a diversity of children are presented — of course, as usual, diversity did not mean disability.

Even though children with disabilities are more likely to be victims of violence than other children, none were represented in the commercial.

“Well, of course, not,” said the young man, “because you can understand why a parent would want to hit a disabled child.”

I was stunned.

He continued, “You raise normal kids, you feed disabled ones.”

I said, “Seriously, you are seriously saying this to me?”

I thought maybe he was just trying to wind me up, but a couple seconds more of chat, and it was clear, they’d received the message that disabled people are simply “useless eaters” – echoes of a different time are still chilling.

I know that people with disabilities have been consistently devalued by society, but for the first time I feel like we are also being “costed.” Suddenly I remember those old math and morals questions – the ones that went like this: if there are three people in a boat, a young woman, a small child and a disabled man, and there is only enough food for two, who would you throw out? Suddenly I realize how close I am to the side of the boat, and how rough the sea.

It’s six o’clock.

I can’t watch the news anymore. I’m afraid that, again, I will learn that the whole of Europe’s banking system is about to collapse because people with disabilities eat candy.

Dave Hingsburger has worked with people with intellectual disabilities for more than 35 years. He is currently the Director of Clinical and Educational Services for Vita Community Living Services, an agency serving people with intellectual disabilities. Four years ago he became a wheelchair user. He has published more than 30 books and hundreds of articles in newspapers, magazines and journals. He wrote and voiced the award-winning radio documentary “Life, Death and Disability.” In 2009 he was inducted into the Canadian Disability Hall of Fame. He writes the award-winning disability blog Rolling Around in My Head.

No wind in Speech from the Throne: Go figure

The Ontario government’s Speech from the Throne contains 2,737 words. Not one of those words is ‘wind.’ And only one of them is ‘green.’

Extraordinary, isn’t it? In all that expanse of rhetoric, messaging, massaging, visioning and stroking, ululation and pontification, there is not one mention of Premier Dalton McGuinty’s signature energy goal – turning the Ontario countryside into an endless thicket of 500-foot wind turbines.

Perhaps McGuinty has belatedly gotten the message?

Perhaps the election just past – which reduced his government to a minority, cost him what little rural foothold he had and torched the Liberal Party’s hopes outside Toronto for at least another election cycle – finally drove home what farmers and landowners, by their simple requests for a hearing, could not.

(One needs to undertake a hunger strike apparently, as raw-milk activist Michael Schmidt recently did, to get a hearing from this premier.)

It’s a pity, the Liberals must feel as they contemplate their small, populous urban islands of power surrounded by vast acreages of Conservative blue, that they didn’t listen better, sooner.

It now seems that, in the absence of any official concession from McGuinty that he badly underestimated and misjudged rural Ontarians, the wind-power revolution may die a slow death.

The Feedin Tariff (FIT) program is under review. That means subsidies for so-called green energy are headed sharply lower. Given the economic gloom, reflected in the throne speech, we can expect this to happen quickly. The new pricing structure is due in mid-December.

Falling prices will mean a collapse in demand for green energy gear of all kinds – including turbines. The turbines will become more expensive to build and buy, because of reduced economies of scale. That and reduced profit prospects will lead to a flight of capital. Investors looking for easy money will go elsewhere.

Energy Minister Chris Bentley has already said the province now intends to pay more attention to local concerns – without returning control over the location of wind farms to local control.

That’s a first step. Bentley will find that, far from having been either discouraged or mollified by their partial victory in the election, anti-wind activists have been emboldened. The local political action committees aren’t going away.

Two thousand more wind turbines are reportedly planned, for Ontario: I would bet money that the vast majority of them never get built.

Here’s what McGuinty would do, if he wanted to make amends to his rural citizenry and create at least a window for country comeback, sometime in the future:

First, he’d apologize, for being a lousy listener, so wrapped up in the certitude of his own sanctity that he became deaf to all opinions but his own. He’d apologize for shunting rural people aside as though their voices don’t matter.

Second, he’s say the Green Energy Act needs to be revised, in substantive ways. He’d return planning control to local councils.

Third, he’d order wind farms, wherever there is significant local opposition, scrapped – or have these projects moved to areas where local people want them, or where there are no people.

Fourth, he’d commit his government to helping farmers and small landowners acquire, build and maintain small eco-energy projects designed to provide energy to a household, or a group of households in a neighbourhood.

That could include small wind mills, as have existed in the Netherlands and Belgium for centuries.

Steve McQueen On Shooting Shame

British film director Steve McQueen (no, a different one) and Irish-German actor Michael Fassbender have formed a rich creative partnership, starting with Hunger, the story of real-life IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, and now in Shame, a dark and explicit drama about a man who is addicted to sex.

While McQueen is co-writer (with playwright Abi Morgan) of Shame, Fassbender had a lot of creative input. “I don’t hire robots. Of course he does his thing within the scene,” said McQueen, who also acknowledged that he doesn’t much like the idea of interviews about his work.

He gave the example of one of the most fraught scenes in Shame, when Fassbender’s character, a New York businessman named Brandon, is having dinner with a co-worker (Nicole Beharie). It’s a first date, and we know that he wants probably wants to bed her immediately — Brandon is relentless in his pursuit of sex in any possible combination — while she is feeling out this handsome but strangely intense new companion.

The scene unfolds without much dialogue, but it’s a tour de force of visual storytelling. McQueen said it didn’t start that way.

“Most acting is what is the thing that is happening between words,” he said in an interview at the Toronto film festival in September. “All that scene is totally improvised. If you read the script and see the movie, it’s totally different. The script is a point of departure, because I don’t make illustrations. I make films. I make cinema. And that’s what I want to make.”

McQueen said the original scene, as written, was “rubbish” because the character of Brendon had moved on during the filming of the movie.

Fassbender and McQueen: No robots

“It changes in the process. It has to. I hope so. I’d hate to have to sit through what we have, but if we have to it’s good enough. It’s brilliant. We can go to it. But you want to push it further than what you know. You want to be surprised.”

Wakey-wakey, Rob Anders

There are times when a quick nap is welcome and appropriate, usually involving toddlers and long-distance travel.

Then there’s the times when you may want to nap, but really shouldn’t. Behind the wheel. On a beach without sunscreen.

And in front of the TV cameras in the House of Commons, while a colleague is speaking. Calgary Conservative MP Rob Anders got caught doing just this. A video uploaded to YouTube last week shows Anders floating off to Lala Land while Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan speaks:

How did visa system slip through the cracks?

There are bad people overseas bent on doing Canadians harm, security experts tell us. There’s no reason to disbelieve this. We know we’re on al-Qaeda’s short list.

This is one reason Canada has had soldiers fighting and dying in Afghanistan for a decade, correct? We’ve heard the argument many times: Either we fight the Jihadists where they live or they’ll bring the fight to us. Federal ministers, led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, rarely miss an opportunity to jog our collective elbows about the dangers of complacency and the need for vigilance. They are, after all, a law and order government.

Well, fine. Vigilance makes sense. But if this is true, and the government believes its own messaging, then why are Canada’s overseas border offices, ten years after 9/11 and five years after the Conservatives took power, a sieve?

Judging from the auditor-general’s report released Tuesday, this description is fair. Indeed, based on the findings in chapter two, it seems miraculous good luck that foreign terrorists haven’t already landed in Canada to wreak havoc, multiple times. Memo to the department of foreign affairs: Don’t anyone tell Hillary Clinton.

Citizenship and Immigration Canada and the Canadian Border Services Agency, with help from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the RCMP, have a tough job. They must weed out wannabe visitors who’ve “engaged in spying, subversion, terrorism or acts of violence,” or belong to organizations that have engaged in such.

They must identify and block applicants who “have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity,” or were senior members of a government guilty of such crimes. And they must spot mobsters, common criminals, and people carrying infections diseases that pose a threat to public health.

In practice, precious little spotting goes on.

Think of a needle, in a haystack. In 2010, According to government data cited by the AG, 317,000 people applied for permanent residence in Canada. Only 817 of these were rejected for health or security reasons. More than a million applied for temporary residence. An unknown number of these were rejected for health, safety or security reasons. Here, perhaps, is why: This avalanche of cases rested on the shoulders of just 270 often inexperienced visa officers, aided by 1,305 locally engaged staff. They’re swamped.

Why, often inexperienced? It turns out working in immigration control isn’t particularly glamorous, CBC’s drama The Border notwithstanding. CBSA analysts work long hours, turnover is high, and consequently more than 40 per cent of them have less than two years’ experience.

Astonishingly, the AG found that “in the absence of a formal training program, they rely mostly on guidance material, coaching, and on-the-job training to acquire the knowledge they need to fulfill their responsibilities.”

These folks are charged with keeping al-Qaeda, among other nasties, out of Canada. And they’re winging it?

Polygamy: Will it become legal in Canada?

A road in the Bountiful community. Photo by Ian Smith of the Vancouver Sun

Polygamy is probably not something that crosses your mind too often, but if you live in British Columbia, Utah, Arizona, Texas and a few other states in America, it is a simmering issue that has come to a boil in Canada.

Tomorrow the British Columbia Supreme Court will issue its ruling as to whether polygamy should be legalized in Canada.

Last November the British Columbia Supreme Court began proceedings intended to grapple with the law that criminalizes polygamy in Canada and has since 1890.

The case began when rumours and reports of sexual exploitation, coercion, and human trafficking in the small British Columbia community of Bountiful came to the attention of B.C.’s Attorney General.

Bountiful is the home of Canada’s most high-profile fundamentalist Mormon community, a group that has links to the infamous Warren Jeffs, the leader and high priest of the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints in the United States, who practice polygamy as part of their religion.

Bountiful community leader Winston Blackmore.

Jeffs has been the target of U.S. authorities for some time and is currently serving a lengthy prison term for his role in the rape of an underage Mormon wife.

Bountiful’s leader is Winston Blackmore, who is said to have 25 wives and 101 children. Blackmore married five of his wives when they were still children, and it is this conduct that has attracted the attention of the B.C. government and feminist organizations across Canada.

Those in favour of maintaining polygamy as a criminal offence argue the law is vital to protect society’s vulnerable, in this case women and children.

Others say that Canadians don’t want a society that encourages multiple marriages, with the social ills that follow. The family law issues alone are mind-boggling.

Those who support striking down the law say that it violates freedom of religion and freedom of association, both protected under Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association, a group whose members are involved in intimate relationships consisting of three or more consenting adults, line up with those who say the law must go. They take the position they ought to be free to love and live with whomever they choose, and the law against polygamy has no place in their bedrooms.

The legal and moral issues arising from polygamy are sensitive and complex. The court heard testimony from dozens of witnesses who will be directly affected by the outcome of the proceedings.

What everyone agrees upon is that this case will undoubtedly end up in the Supreme Court of Canada.

My prediction? The law against polygamy will stand and the criminal activities arising from the practice will be vigorously prosecuted, while the activities of consenting adults will remain unfettered.

Poetry-inspired pop art show in Toronto

Calling all pop art fans! Toronto’s gallerywest will showcase local artist/director/writer Jeff Campagna‘s pop-art poetry beginning tonight, November 22nd. The gallery will display five art pieces that were derived from his first two paperback volumes of “A Writer Under the Influence.”

Campagna wrote, directed and produced the 2008 film, Six Reasons Why, which starred Colm Feore (The Borgias, 24, Thor) and is currently working on his full-length novel, The Money Machine.

A Writer Under The Influence runs until November 30th. The opening reception will take place this Thursday, November 24th (from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.) and will feature live music from The FranDiscos.

gallerywest is located at 1172 Queen Street West. For more information, click here.